Incident prediction information and incident statistic/analysis information are useful to prevent a vehicle incident. Such information is provided to, for example, the driver of a vehicle, a road administrator who performs safety design of a road and examines an improvement plan, a police officer who makes an inspection of a traffic incident and a traffic safety campaign, an incident appraiser and an insurer conducting an incident analysis, and the like.
It is said that about 40 percent of traffic incidents occur due to delay in perception or a mistake in judgment on a danger without avoidance behavior. With respect to following driving in a single road, various safety driving support techniques to address inattention to the front of drivers are developed.
For example, an active safety system mounted on a car is one of such techniques. The system measures the distance to a driving vehicle or a pedestrian in front by using a millimeter-wave radar or a laser radar. The system always monitors whether safe distance is maintained according to drive speed or not on the basis of the measured distance and, when the vehicle comes too close, gives warning to the driver.
At an intersection where traffic is heavy, a driver has to disperse visual attention in a wide range. Consequently, a system which monitors only the front as described above cannot sufficiently support safety driving. Many of traffic incidents occur in intersections. For example, about 60% (about 70% in big cities) of traffic incidents in Japan occur in and around intersections. Therefore, also on driving in intersections, a technique for supporting safety driving is demanded.
For example, Patent Literature 1 discloses a dangerous place display system which estimates the courses of vehicles and displays an area predicted to be crossed by the courses as a dangerous area so as to be overlapped on map data.
For example, Patent Literature 2 discloses a notifying system, when an oncoming vehicle located in a blind spot of a vehicle which turns right in an intersection is present, of notifying the driver on the vehicle turning right of the presence of the oncoming vehicle.
In the conventional techniques, an area (hereinbelow, called “incident/potential-incident factor area” or simply “factor area”) having high possibility of an incident or a state (hereinbelow, called “potential incident”) very close to an incident in an intersection is specified and presented. That is, the conventional techniques can support safety driving in intersections. In the case where an incident or a potential incident occurs in reality, the conventional techniques can support a subsequent work of finding the cause by the police or the like using a record of the position and time of occurrence of a blind spot.